Databases & Data Engineering
Databases designed and built from nothing, populated from scraped sources or migrated from another system, with pipelines, deduplication, search, dashboards and an admin interface on top.
Your own database built properly
This is a common request and a badly served one People come to us with a spreadsheet that has outgrown itself, a pile of scraped files, or data sitting in somebody else's system, and they want one database they actually own. That is a design job before it is a loading job, and doing it in the wrong order is why so many of these end up unusable.
Design and build
- Requirements and entity discovery, so the structure matches how you actually work
- Schema design, normalisation where it belongs and deliberate denormalisation where it earns speed
- Keys, constraints, referential integrity and validation at the database level rather than by hope
- Indexing designed against the queries you will really run
- Versioned migrations, so future changes are repeatable instead of manual
- PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, SQLite, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Supabase, Firebase, BigQuery, Snowflake or ClickHouse, chosen for the workload
Filling it with your data
- Population from scraped sources, with the scraping built and maintained by the same team
- Migration from another database, a legacy system, a CRM export or a folder of spreadsheets
- Staging layers, so raw data is never loaded straight into production tables
- Cleaning, standardisation and type correction, including the damage spreadsheets do to codes and dates
- Deduplication and entity resolution with composite keys, fuzzy matching and survivorship rules that are reported rather than silently applied
- Enrichment against other sources, with provenance recorded per field
- Incremental loads and change capture, so a refresh does not mean reloading everything
- Reconciliation counts after every run, because a load that silently drops rows is worse than one that fails
Running it and using it
- Scheduling and orchestration, with retries, alerting and a log of every run
- Warehouse modelling where reporting is the point, including dimensional models and history tracking
- Full text and faceted search on top of the data
- Query optimisation, execution plan work and cost control on managed platforms
- Backups, restore testing, replication and monitoring
- Access control, row level permissions and audit trails
- APIs over the database in REST or GraphQL, so applications and partners can use it safely
- An admin interface or dashboard, so people who are not engineers can search, edit and export
- Connections out to spreadsheets, CRMs, e-commerce platforms and reporting tools
- Documentation and handover, including the schema, the pipelines and the decisions behind them
How you can take it
We build it deliver it or staff it to you A finished database with pipelines and an interface, handed over and documented. Ongoing operation and maintenance. Or a data engineer placed on your team while we keep the supervision and the cover.
Frequently asked
We have scraped data in files. Can you turn it into a real database?
Yes, and that is one of the most common things we are asked for. The structure is designed first from what the data has to answer, then the files are staged, cleaned, deduplicated and loaded with reconciliation counts so you can see exactly what went in and what did not.
Can you pull data out of another database or system into ours?
Yes. Migration from another database, a legacy system, a CRM or a set of exports, with field mapping, type correction, deduplication and a reconciliation report at the end. Where the source keeps changing we build incremental loads rather than repeated full reloads.
Which database should we use?
It depends on the shape of the data and the queries. A relational engine for structured records with relationships, a document store where the shape varies, a search engine where full text matters, and an analytical warehouse where reporting is the point. We will tell you which one fits and why rather than defaulting to one answer.
Do we get something we can actually use, or just a database?
You get an interface. An admin panel or dashboard so people who are not engineers can search, edit, filter and export, plus an API if other systems need access. A database nobody outside the technical team can open is only half a deliverable.
Who keeps it running?
Either you or us. We hand over documentation, schema and pipelines so your own team can run it, or we operate it with monitoring, backups, restore testing and scheduled loads under a maintenance arrangement.